Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.